There’s a post floating around about how Zuko not telling the Gaang how he got his scar reflects him “taking accountability” for his actions, instead of manipulating them by guilt-tripping them and placing responsibility onto Ozai, his adult abuser.
There are some replies to it pointing out that in general Zuko tends to not be manipulative (or lie) even when it would serve him, and explanations offered for this ranging from the Watsonian (largely “he’s autistic” and variants thereupon) to the Doylist (“he’s being narratively contrasted with very manipulative Azula”). Some other comments about him not wanting to share private trauma with people he doesn’t know well.
But in this particular case I don’t actually think it’s any of that, really, from Zuko’s point of view, because the most fundamental thing of it is that he’s an abused kid.
People don’t tend to appreciate how much growing up surrounded by the language of abuse, and/or in a culture of abuse (as Zuko was - dozens of people saw Ozai burn him, and none objected), affects you. It’s not just about the trauma directly. It’s about being forcibly taught that this is normal and deserved to the degree that you genuinely don’t realize most of the world doesn’t.
It’s about casually mentioning things about your childhood and everyone responding with shock and horror, and you being confused, because you had no idea that was yet another thing about your life that wasn’t normal. It’s about how you eventually realize you just can’t talk about the first couple decades of your life at all without being accused of trauma-dumping and guilt-tripping and manipulation, being punished again for failing to protect others from the discomfort of hearing second-hand about something you had to live through with a child’s body.
And the thing is? Zuko isn’t at that last sentence’s point yet, when we see him with the Gaang. He’s before that, at the “does not yet realize this isn’t normal” point. We know this, because of how he responds to Iroh at the end: kneeling in front of him waiting for punishment. He doesn’t think abuse is abnormal; he thinks it’s a natural and deserved response to his poor behavior, so thoroughly that he believes even Iroh would do it. All the way to the end of the show! (After he’s had any opportunity to say anything to the Gaang!)
Whether he would choose to explain his scar to the Gaang if he knew it would make them like/forgive him is a moot point. He had no idea that it would. With his frame of reference, he assumed their reactions would be somewhere in the range of “yeah, why are you whining about something that normal and mundane, I don’t bore you with stories of how Gyatso used airbending to punish me” to “dang, how badly did you fuck up to deserve that? you must be even worse a person than we realized” to “he went easy on you and should’ve done worse”.
It would never occur to him to share the scar story to get the Gaang to like/forgive him, because he has no way to know that they would react with shock and horror instead of dismissal or putting even more blame on him.
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